Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were journals but mostly scrapbooks of ideas, things observed, and things to remember. By the 1600s, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students in such institutions as Oxford. Beautiful blank books are still available for this purpose but the internet is so much more interesting as the content is shared.

06/11/2010

For things English!

"For Harthover had been built at ninety different times, and in nineteen different styles, and looked as if sombody had built a whole street of houses of every imaginable shape, and then stirred them together with a spoon." p.22 The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby

"... and another was bold enough to tell him that his house was ugly, but he said he lived inside it, and not outside; and another, that there was no unity in it, but he said that that was just why he liked the old place. For he liked to see how each Sir John, and Sir Hugh, and Sir Ralph, and Sir Randal, had left his mark upon the place, each after his own taste; and he had no more notion of disturbing his ancestor's work than of disturbing their graves. For now the house looked like a real live house, that had a history, and had grown and grown as the world grew; and that it was only an upstart fellow who did not know who his own grandfather was, who would change it for some spick and span new Gothic or Elizabethan thing, which looked as if it had been all spawned in a night, as mushrooms are."